What does literature tell us about the relationship between forest structural attributes and species richness in temperate forests? – A review

Abstract

The effects of forest management on species richness and diversity have become important research interests. The need to maintain biodiversity for forest ecosystem functioning has led to the question of how strongly and in what ways forest management modifies the diversity and abundance of different species groups. It is well known that many forest species rely on specific structures that may be modified by forest management. Assessing the impact of forest management on species richness may therefore require identification of structural properties. For this literature review we identified a large set of structural attributes that can serve as potential drivers of the richness of different species groups. Most studies included here focused on only one or a few structural attributes as explanatory variables and a limited number of species groups as dependent variables; we therefore analyzed the available publications across species and structural properties. We gathered 410 relationships of structure and species richness out of 85 studies from the temperate region in Europe. Positive, negative, and neutral (non-existent) correlations between species richness and the presence of specific structural properties in European temperate forests were then compiled. Canopy gaps and structural attributes related to old-growth successional stage such as stand age and the share of large old trees were mostly positively correlated with species richness of the different taxa. Especially old-growth structures were ranked high in the reviewed literature. The structural attributes that were mainly positively correlated with species richness or the richness of groups of species may be used for further development of biodiversity monitoring concepts and forest management.